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A collection of 2,601 blog posts
Anne Isabelle Ritchie coined a concept in the 1880s that we still use today. Modernized, it is: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The conventional wisdom is that it’s always preferable to teach someone how to fish. However, the Buffer support team has been thinking about this concept a lot lately. We’re learning that often there is a huge market for skipping the lesson completely. This can be a stretch for tech suppo
Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It’s a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re blogging about perfect blogging. So I hope you’ll still trust the advice here even if you don’t find this post itself to be flawless. I’m sure we’d all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection—however it is that you measure perfection—so I researched
We love setting goals for improvement here at the Buffer blog, and one of our most recent challenges has been this: Every post gets an original image. This might not sound like such a tall task until you consider that Courtney and I are journalism majors whose skills lie in painting pictures with words and not so much in painting pictures with Photoshop. We try our best, in the name of visual content. You’ve perhaps heard of visual content? The term seems to be everywhere these day
The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent as much time away f
One of the most important differences for me personally in how I run Buffer compared to the last one I founded has been how I treat the product at each stage of the process. With ideas such as the Lean Startup, there is a huge amount of pressure to ship very early, and rightly so—the sooner we can validate our assumptions and gain more understanding about how our users react to our product, the better. However, quotes such as the following can make us feel like we should believe our product is
In August 2012, my cofounders and I decided to pull the plug on Fancite , the startup I had been working on for over a year and half. Making that call was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. The days that followed were highly existential. Initially, I was relieved and excited about doing something new, however as a few days passed my (perceived) reality hit me: “I wasted all that time building somethi
Infographics can contain a wealth of useful, interesting, and captivating information—but only if readers take the time to survey the entire graphic. It’s no secret that the typical Internet user quickly bounces from site to site while shuffling among multiple tabs and windows. With the added distraction from smartphones, TV, and print media, it can be tough to get focused attention. But time spent on the Internet is valuable—especially for marketers and advertisers, who covet each and every se
Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. An
At Buffer we have a focus on self-improvement. We share what we are working on each week and get encouragement and tips from other members of the team. Here is a recent example . One of my improvements recently has been to get a software side project up and running. As I’m a programmer by trade, this shouldn’t present any particular difficulty—but software has this uncanny knack of making things slightly more complicated than they really should be. This is the story of the last
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson Around two years ago I stopped watching and reading mainstream news. I don’t read a single newspaper, offline or online, and I don’t watch any TV at all. I mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook, and it created a lot of discussion, so I wanted to expand on my thoughts and experiences. When I first started ignoring news, I felt that I was simply making an excuse, that if I had
In most industries, including the tech world, “support” is a piteous word. Posts like this one, while written in jest, enforce the stereotype that working in support essentially sucks. We are known for getting abused by ranting, angry customers. We can’t take a day off, because the emails never stop flowing in. We must just be doing this to get trained with the company, right? Well, I’d like to offer a slightly different view into the world of customer service. While we do occasionally bear t
Can one ever have enough Twitter tips? I know I can never get enough of them. Twitter is a constantly evolving, constantly challenging place to experiment, enjoy, and discover, and we all have a unique approach to the way we get things done with our tweets and followers. I’ve shared some of my favorite tips before—both for beginners and for intermediates—and we thought it might be fun to tap you all to share your expertise! Below you’ll find some tips from the Buffer community, as well as a f
Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. An
I’m excited to share the details for Buffer’s progress in April. Last month was an incredible time for Buffer with our third Buffer retreat, some huge product announcements, and continued MRR growth. Here is the update I just sent to our investors. If I can answer any questions or if something comes to mind, please share in the comments. :-) If you want to read our update from March, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users
How do we know what features to work on next for Buffer? A few months ago, we had the opportunity to test out a method of investigating which types of social accounts Buffer users would be most interested in using next. Here’s the tool we used to find out which type of account was most-wanted, and how we followed up with everyone who sent us a request. What we did Here’s our current Connect page: The Connect page didn’t always look like this, however. Just a few months ago several of these
Do you know what you’re posting, sharing, and blogging this Thursday? How about two Thursdays from now? Thursday of next month? Thursday of next year? We don’t have things figured out quite to that extreme here at Buffer, but we do have some idea of what’s ahead. (Those of you who are yearly planners, our hat’s off to you!) Planning content far into the future is a common element of many marketing strategies, and the erstwhile content calendar—in its many shapes and forms—fits this role perfec
April has been a very interesting month. MRR growth has slowed to around 7.08% increase, which is the lowest over the past few months. What’s interesting is that most of the growth came from Business plans, which grew MRR by 15.6% in April. Awesome plan MRR growth slowed to 4.6% in March, and was 8.3% in the month before. At the same time, churn has decreased by almost 2 percentage points to 5.28% on the Awesome plan (compared to 7% in March) and also to 5.99% on Business plans. Awesome numbe
Picture this: It’s your first month on the job as a Customer Happiness Hero. A core piece of your company’s app stops working. And 16 of the 20 team members of the team are on flights across the world. That’s exactly what happened to our newest two sweet, unsuspecting Happiness Heroes when Buffer stopped shortening links for a few days in April. (Both new heroes have since completed Buffer Bootcamp and come on board despite this. :) Sorry about that, Patrik and Dave! Lesson learned about all tr
I manage the family budget with speed and efficiency. My spreadsheets are slick, my workflow is fast, and I’ve learned enough tricks along the way to shave hours off my process. I’ve also never bothered to teach anyone else how I do what I do. Don’t worry, this post isn’t about money management. (Phew!) Rather, I find that it can be hugely helpful to share the tools, tips, and tricks that make the things we do on a regular basis as efficient as possible. Using Buffer for social media managemen
I’m thrilled to announce that Patrik Ward has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Happiness Hero! One of the most immediately noticeable qualities about Patrik is that he seems to exist with a laugh always just under the surface. Even when focusing, he is one conversational shift away from splitting into a huge, encouraging grin that spreads to every face and lifts every nearby spirit. It has an ef
Being a columnist means something a bit different to me than it did growing up. When I started down my writing path, I adored magazines and newspapers and the superheroes who wrote weekly or monthly columns in the op-eds or the back pages. Now, I adore those who write at my favorite blogs and websites. The back page of Sports Illustrated has become, for me, the featured spot on Huffington Post. And the most amazing news of all is that being a columnist online is a dream that anyone—you, me, yo
Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer. We really stepped up our game on the security front. We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked • Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features • No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups • 1 new offer made, and 6
I’m thrilled to announce that Dave Chapman has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Weekend Warrior! Chats with Dave are one of the things I look forward to all week. He approaches his work, his teammates, and his self-improvement efforts with a level of passion that is simply inspiring. Since he has come on board for Buffer Bootcamp, he has read several books, run more every week than the last, se
Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer. We really stepped up our game on the security front. We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked * Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features * No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups * 1 new offer made, an